Remember How We Forgot
by fineontheoutside
Summary: "And I know I shouldn't have wished for it, but in a makeshift heaven of believing that somewhere there had to be a shooting star glinting off its light in a universe with no end, I started wishing that we could be the middle of everything that has ever existed." Kaito moves to Tokyo and loses contact with Aoko for nearly a decade only to meet her again and contemplate his life.


_Sorry for the really long hiatus. I'm back! I've been so busy with AP testing and college prep and graduation and wow I've just been overwhelmed. But I've been working on this piece on and off for a couple of months so I hope you enjoy it. I'm personally really proud of it._

If I knew back then, what I know now, on the day we graduated and climbed up to the top of the clock tower, I'd point to the skyline of the town we grew up in and tell you, "this is all for you." Because you'd never believe that you deserved more than a second thought, I wish that I'd taken the time to tell you that you that if I could, I'd draw up the entire little town we spent most of our time growing up in and engrave it into our memories. And if I knew back then what I know now, when I saw you in an elevator after being deprived of your wonderfully intoxicating presence for so long, I wish I could have found the words to remind ourselves of something that we never should have lost. The name that came through my cracked lips made me wonder if there was any way it could possibly be you after I've learned to keep breathing without you by my side for nearly ten years.

Instead I walked, brushing past the men and women in their dull professional suits that looked like mine into the elevator without noticing who the other passenger was. I never took a glimpse at the pearl inside the large metal oyster. And if I could do over time, I would tell you something beautiful about fate or loneliness or yearning but instead, when I saw you out of the corner of my eye and a look of realization had seized us, we began to play an odd game of us looking at the other and glancing away as the other did the same. Until the tempo changed on us and we stumbled into each other's gaze. Your name had settled in my mouth like chocolate beginning to melt or floated in the air like an old love we had both nearly forgotten. It was you and it was me. A few years older, a few experiences more mature, and nearly an eternity of memories we thought we had lost forever. I was waiting for you all those years that we had been apart; I just didn't know it until then.

There's something beautiful in stating the obvious. The moments that are so unexplainably wonderfully riveting that you're glad that you made it to this point in your life. You're glad that you picked up the pieces and tried to fit them together best you could and kept fighting when all you wanted to do was melt away into oblivion in that bathroom with the blue wallpaper when you were home alone. And so maybe that was why when we looked into each other's eyes all I could say was that it was you. And it was an odd sound that came out. There you were standing before me, the girl I grew up with yet haven't seen for the last nine years in the same elevator as me in a commercial building in Tokyo when years before we had dreamed of pursuing different careers close to our sleepy hometown. A hundred miles, nine years, and an unaccountable number of missed opportunities, and the two of us rode the same elevator down, and even now, I believe that, that has to count for something.

I could tell you that countless times of how great stating the obvious is. We all do it. In the moments that we can't believe is occurring, we have to say it out loud. It's like when you pinch yourself to make sure you're awake from a reality so wonderful it has to be a dream. I took an array of classes on literature and writing during my college years. I filled the emptiness your absence created with contemporary prose and historic sonnets. I could recite all of the first lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels or write of the terrible fears we don't dare acknowledge that could rival Sylvia Plath. And yet, when we found each other in that elevator, my mouth ran dry and I couldn't find myself to recite Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day…) and instead could only find the words that illuminated who we were. There's unwavering beauty in reciting the obvious. It forces us to admit how it exists, like the heavy rain outside that some student can't help but to enlighten his classmates on or friends that tease a blushing preteen on their first love. It couldn't be helped.

"It's been a while, Aoko."

"It has, hasn't it?"

The obvious reminds us of how time passes so quickly until we can't remember the last time it's rained or the last time we've fallen in love. It serves to nudge us towards our lives, reminding us that somewhere along the way, we've grown up sense the last time. And maybe we didn't grow up perfect like how all parents fruitlessly wish for their children to be, but we grow up anyway in our own little rhythm that we perfect ourselves. The obvious teaches of the fine line between the seconds and hours and months that all pass us by so quick that sometimes all we can do is give a little wave before we lose sight of it. I've learned that the moments that we take for granted, as obvious and absolute as they are, are quickly stolen and swallowed up by the days and nights and months and years and millenniums that will take place after it until eternity is a quiet place of no memories. Where everything has happened but there's no one left to remember it.

And I remember my first roommate trying to explain astronomy to me in between a Houdini documentary, nursing a bottle of cheap beer, and warding off sleep, how the universe is infinite in every which direction you could imagine. Claiming all of time and space for itself. Nothing can escape it. Eternity is a piece of paper scribbled with nonsensical drawings with no end and no start, where any specific set of scribbles could be the middle through the endless expansion. Continuing on and on, growing with the stories yet to be told. And I know I shouldn't have wished for it, but in a makeshift heaven of believing that somewhere there had to be a shooting star glinting off its light in a universe with no end, I started wishing that we could be the middle of everything that has ever existed.

And maybe all we can do is find an empty spot on the sheet of paper and make your mark next to the billions of others that have already done so and the trillions that will soon follow. Maybe all we really can do is to have tried to find someone to share a piece of ourselves with and hope that in the end, we meant something to someone.

So maybe that's why when I asked you to go home with me, you said yes.

And maybe that was why I asked in the first place.

And I know that I wasn't the first person to tell you that I love you. In fact, I might've been closer to the third or fourth. You were so inexplicably beautiful that if you told me that you had twenty-two people before me that have fallen in love with you before I had the chance to, I would've believed it and fallen deeper into the feeling of privilege I became engulfed in with every squeeze of the hand you offered me. So yes, even though there may have been twenty-two other people who have held you close and said the same words I have, I was the last one. There are seven billion people out in the world, rushing past each other and falling in love, and to be your lucky number twenty-three out of the infinite other possibilities that could've occurred, I was pretty damn lucky. You had seven billion other choices, other possibilities, other people you could have let you pushed the hair out of your face and kiss the temple of your forehead and through some brilliant mistake, you chose me. There are seven billion people in the world and I became the first one that stayed. I want to believe that I meant something to you.

My roommate, the astronomer, we rarely got along if one or both of weren't too shitfaced to feel the hangover creeping into veins like a disease, but we kept each other company in our late college years because there was something we found in each other that we needed.

For him, it was a laugh. The first few days after any break for vacation and he returned from his grandparent's house with a couple of bruises that flourished on his torso like spilled watercolors and occasionally another small circular cigarette burn to add to his collection he kept hidden under long sleeves. We never talked of it, an unspoken rule we respected even when he'd come home in a drunken stupor at four in the morning knocking over the potted succulent and screaming for his Uncle to keep his hands off of him. In the afternoon the next day, he'd offer me a bite of his bagel as he downed a dangerous number of bright red pain killers. A peace offering of a wrong he couldn't help but commit. I've only seen him cry once and that was a week before graduation when he took a phone call from home and was told his Uncle had been died of a heart attack. To this day, I still can't understand why he cried for the man that hurt him but I suppose that there's a large array of kinds of love. There are more kinds of love than the ones that my parents gave me when I came home with a scrape in my knee or the one we exchanged in the heat of the night. He had a love that he could never explain for his uncle and kept it hidden under long sleeves and the bubbles of a beer on tap.

I continued to share my rent with him through our irrelevant bickering and his poorly veiled victim of abuse for the fixation I have for my father. Dad, the ever glorious heroine of my childhood, who died before I understood the concept of death, somehow kept me from filling my search history with apartments around the college campus. In my ever twisted mind, I kept Dad close and the drunken astronomer closer by the comforting nonsense my roommate would sputter out about the absolute that was space and an uncanny resemblance to the physicist that spoke at Dad's funeral.

Dad, ever the atheist that manipulated magic, had requested to Mom that this man speak at his funeral in place of a priest before he died. And the man, young but with the beginnings of gray strands aching through soft brown tufts that he kept most of it confined in a long ponytail that curved into his shoulder. There were bags under his gentle eyes from the stress of reality and his smile never came easily but was as soft as his voice when the words passed through his pale thin lips. The speaker and my roommate both carried the weight of the world on their aching shoulders and pretended that it was just an odd fraying stitch of fabric in their shirt.

The physicist stood up in front of the crowd in place of a priest and spoke in a voice that you'd believe anything he'd say. He spoke in a voice that you believed in and wanted desperately to believe in you. And when he spoke, he told the grieving family and friends of Kuroba Toichi that energy never dies. Stars and cosmos and galaxies all carry energy and when they die, overtime, their energies live on and transfer from one form to another. We're all made of stardust, he told us. You were sitting there next to me as he talked, your eyes wet and your cheeks pink. And I think I believed the man as he spoke of people that hold the energy of space in their core. Looking into your glassy eyes, I could see stars in the deep blue depth of them, burning behind the tears. The soft glow of your skin, so utterly electric and alive; all of your features flaring brighter as the energy of the cosmos shined through your being.

The physicist continued to speak of my father to be the wind that tugged at my mother's dark dress and the sun that beat a thin layer of sweat onto our brow. Dad became another star somewhere up on the night sky that will one day birth another being and was the very words that he spoke.

I felt comfort in what the scientist was saying but I think I stopped listening after that. We were children at the time Dad died. We were two kids too fixated on trying not to fall out of trees to know that we were falling in love. If I knew then what I knew now, I would have dried off your tears and told you that I could see a human made of stardust. And somehow that would have made us feel a little grander, I bet.

We grew up, as children do, a little too slow in some parts but fast all the same. We were quick to note of every inch that was added to our height and how much faster we could get home from school if we ran with every passing year. As we filled our elective periods with classes like psychology and chemistry, we failed to realize the creeping reality of the heat we felt in our faces when we grabbed one another's hand as we had done plenty of times before when we climbed onto a higher branch of the lone willow tree in the school courtyard.

There was so much growing up to be done between the both of us and the years we naively thought would last forever. There wasn't any space or time left over for love, even when it already existed within us. When we've spent all of our lives in the small town far away from big cities and the events on the news that Mom turned off the TV from, it never felt like there was going to be a day when I couldn't throw pebbles out of my balcony and onto your window at two in the morning because I wanted to tell you that the there was a cloud covering the moon that was shaped like the principal's toupee.

Graduation came before either of us knew it, before we could sort our emotions out or voice them. We were standing amongst a curtain of cherry blossoms holding onto our diplomas and ambitions. We tossed our graduation caps and childhood dreams to the wind. We were Ekoda's graduating class of fuck off we made it, and made it we did. I didn't tell you of my plans after high school, you never asked, but I think you knew that I wasn't going to be around to climb trees with you any longer. We were getting too big to climb trees anyway.

So amongst the crowd of celebrating graduates in their black robes and doting parents with their cameras flashing like stars burning out, we gravitated towards each other like we always did. You held my hand and I refused to let go. We'd finally come to the realization that we were running out of time. There was an end to everything and this was ours. Kuroba Kaito and Nakamori Aoko. The names once so sweet together were melting away and leaving a bitter aftertaste. I never ate ice cream after our date in Tropical Land; I just want you to know that.

You didn't ask me where I was going, only to stay with you that night and every night before I left. My one way bullet train ticket was scheduled to leave the next morning. But I told you I would anyway. I could see by the way the stars dulled in your eyes that you saw right through me. We held hands and left the school where our friends and family continued to celebrate adulthood. We never once turned back.

You took me to the clock tower where I picked the lock to the door and we climbed up the stairs to the top. We only stopped once to wipe the tears off your face, your vision was so blurred. I told you I was going to a school in Tokyo right then and we didn't talk about anything else for a while after that. I think I still believed that there was still going to be more time than what we had. We weren't used to seeing the end of our timeline. Time wasn't real to us as we climbed higher up the clock tower. Your hand was safe in mine and it felt surreal to know that the gentle warmth I had grown up beside wasn't going to last forever. We were two teens not yet understanding that our world wasn't infinite.

It took us embarrassingly long to get up those stairs. You were wearing those white heels your mother had worn at her wedding that didn't quite fit you and pinched a little too tightly at the toes and I was being held down the weight of being so far apart from you when you were so close right then. God it was so heavy. Believe me when I say knowing that I was leaving you was something that sincerely terrified me but I'd chosen my future and I hoped that you would too.

When we made it to the top of the tower and sat, dangling our legs over the edge, basking in the glory of the brilliant orange sunset that released a soft and sad glow. We reached the end. And we ran out of words to say. If I knew then what I know now, I would've kissed the temple of you head and let you know that you were so utterly important to me. But I didn't.

Instead we watched the bright warm canvas of a sky slowly fade into darkness in a comfortable silence that left us both empty. The only words we spoke to each other for the remainder of that night was when you grabbed onto the sleeve of my shirt and told me not to forget about you. You told me not to forget everything that I did here in our small town with you beside me. You told me not to forget about the time it rained so hard when we had cleaning duty afterschool that we had to spend the night in the cafeteria and ate canned pears for dinner or the time I threw a rock off of my balcony a little too hard and it had broken your window on the other side of our shared yard space. You told me not to forget about our only official date when we went to Tropical Land.

We made a promise that we weren't going to forget all of the memories we had spent with each other for all of the years we knew each other but I suppose we were making the promise for the sake of an easier goodbye than the sake of an easier reunion. We'd never been apart from each other since we'd known each other and know we were going to be hundreds of miles away. The night ended with the warm summer air settling a silent sadness between us.

We tried to keep in contact when I first moved away. Two AM phone calls and postcards were exchanged but it was never really the same as being there in person and slowly, they stopped. We were friends to almost lovers to strangers and nothing could change that. In the small apartment that I shared with a victim of abuse who fell in love with stars so far away that they couldn't hurt him, I found myself a place to call home even without you by my side. It wasn't the same rhythm but a tempo remained and I built a cadence for myself from there.

We made a promise that we weren't going to forget but I think over the years we forgot anyway. We just remembered that we made a promise that we couldn't keep. And that was the tragedy of growing up. You told me not to forget. But we both did anyway. All we had left was the memory of a broken promise two naïve children who couldn't understand that time and space were the only two absolutes in life had made. I can't possibly remember all of my childhood that I had spent stirring trouble with a bushy haired girl in a small town that felt as big as the world. Lately, all I can remember is how I had forgotten everything that happened in the town where time refused to pass except for the promise I had made with you that I wouldn't.

I visited our town once after I had graduated from college. There wasn't much reason to. Mom had permanently moved out to travel the world and put the house on the market, and I found that you changed your cell phone number after years of losing contact. I thought it was odd at the time that no one was answering your home phone, expecting your father to answer at the very least until I had taken a bus that dropped me off in front of our two houses and I saw both of our houses with small signs illuminating vacancy. "For sale", they read out proudly. I knew my house was in the market but I never imagined you to leave. Maybe I was selfish but I wanted you to stay in the place that I thought was safe from time. I talked to the realtor of the house that was too large for just you and your father. She was a small woman with long dark hair that looked a bit like you in a way if you laughed a little less, and she politely explained to me that the last resident of the house put the house on the market after her father died of a heart attack. Time waits for no one. I had forgotten that once again.

I stopped going back after that. There wasn't much of a reason to stay in the ghost town of memories. I began to do everything I could to distance myself from my past. I started dating girls in Tokyo with straight black hair or blonde hair that fell into perfect little curls. I found myself with girls that wore a little too much makeup that accented their fluorescent brown or sharp black eyes. I dated the girls that I wouldn't make the mistake of thinking was you when I kissed them awake in the morning. I never kept one for more than a couple of weeks, always finding myself picking a fight with them over the contradiction I had made of asking to take her ice-skating when I hated it or birthdays or 3-D movies or clock towers. I once broke up with a confident American girl who was working an internship in the same building I was writing magazine articles when I was drunk for expressing her admiration for the mysterious Kaitou Kid. She was straightforward and beautifully passionate towards the phantom thief that would perform acts of miracles and I found myself disgusted that she romanticized the thefts without knowing the true ulterior motive that went farther than a petty little show. I found that there wasn't a girl out there that I could love quite the same as the small love I shared with the girl with untamable brown hair, soft blue eyes, and a quiet sort of sadness she tried to drown out by giving away pieces of herself to the people she loved the most. I've never loved a girl the same way I loved you and even among all of the girls that I've surrounded myself with, I've never been loved as much or quite the same as the one you gave me with your blood and soul.

I found myself decent paying jobs as a journalist and often worked to tell the story of tragedies that struck Tokyo. I moved from job to job writing whatever caught my attention at the time. Writing because that was the only thing I seemed to be good at. I drowned myself in my words, trying to illustrate the stories of pain that were too different from mine to numb myself. I built a wall trying to forget my the girl on the top of the clock tower by drowning myself in writing for various corrupt large corporations with articles of the murder of the emperor's mistress or an earthquake that tore apart a town that had little claim to fame save it being where one of the world's greatest magicians had settled down there before his death.

You see, I'm glad I found you. I truly am. Even in all of my attempts to escape from what I had left behind, your memory still lingered like the perfume I had bought for you on your birthday all those years ago. I'll tell you know, I might have forgotten pieces of our childhood where the beginnings of our innocent love had nurtured into something more passionate and stronger, but I don't think I can ever forget about the way you made me felt. Because when I saw your small little smile reflect shyly off of the metal walls of the elevator, just once in my life, I felt that time had frozen for us and we stood in the center of everything that existed.

 _Review?_


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